“Bingo. Alex Z looked it up. Milsberg used the whole four hundred thousand dollars plus another eight hundred and fifty thousand, probably from his retirement account.”
“And he didn’t get out in time?”
“Nope.”
“That means Matson didn’t clue him in that SatTek was collapsing.”
“I guess not. And now he’s got almost nothing, literally nothing if he loses his house.”
“It must’ve jangled in his number-crunching brain that something was wrong when the FBI started poking around,” Gage said.
“I don’t think so. Look over there.”
Viz pointed at another white block building housing AccuSoft, an accounting software company whose insider trading scandal rode the front pages for months.
“Gotcha,” Gage said, nodding his head. “Don’t-Call-Me-Bob must have thought SatTek was targeted for the same reason as they were.”
“That’s my guess.”
Gage’s eyes fell on the last slice of Viz’s pizza and his mind looped back through their conversation. “Where’s he eat lunch?”
“A Chinese place over on Tully.”
“Maybe I should join him for a little kung pao chicken tomorrow.”
“Great idea, then you can bring me back some pot stickers. And a mandarin beef.” Viz held up his forefinger. “No, make it a mu shu pork. Or one of those-”
Gage made a show of studying his watch. “How about you try to decide between today and tomorrow?”
“Sure, boss, deciding on lunch is one of the few diversions for a surveillance guy.”
Gage left Viz searching his mental menu, then slipped back into his car. He called Faith on her cell as he was driving back to his office.
“I’m here now.” The words came out as a sigh, her tone answering what would’ve been his next question. There’d been no improvement.
Gage heard shuffling as she walked from Burch’s room. “The doctors come by?”
“Kishore was in an hour ago, but only to give Courtney a hug and try to boost her spirits. The new critical care doctor strode into the room a few minutes ago as if he could do something, but after flipping through the chart and shining a light in Jack’s eyes, he just stood there, kind of slump-shouldered, then shuffled away. It was heartbreaking and-”
Gage winced as Faith’s voice caught. He imagined her and Courtney sitting for hours, their eyes darting toward the monitors, flinching at each beep, then looking to the doctors for reassurance that was never forthcoming.
“Then one of the nurses took Courtney aside and asked whether Jack had an advance directive, and then she just fell apart.”
“I’ll be there in forty minutes.”
CHAPTER 26
D on’t panic,” Gage said when he dropped his business card on the table-for-two in the almost vacant Jade Garden Chinese Restaurant in San Jose twenty-four hours later.
“Private investigator?” the diner asked, looking up. “What did I do?”
“I think it may be something that got done to you.” Gage glanced at the empty chair. “May I?”
“Sure. Why not? Things can’t get any worse.”
Gage sat down and rested his folded hands on the edge of the table, careful to make sure his suit jacket didn’t touch. The plastic tablecloth was sticky, the soy sauce bottle was grimy, and the napkin holder was empty.
“How’s the food?” Gage asked.
“Cheap and better than bringing my lunch.”
Robert Milsberg picked up the card. “Graham Gage, Private Investigator. San Francisco.” He then looked at Gage. “I knew somebody would come knocking, I just figured it would be the FBI.”
“You mean you haven’t been interviewed?”
Milsberg should’ve been the first on the list at SatTek after Matson.
“Not yet.” Milsberg offered a weak smile. “I assumed they were still gathering documents and then they’d call us in one by one.”
“About what?”
“The whole freaking thing. Even Matson…” He peered across the table at Gage. “I guess you know about Matson if you’re talking to me. Even Matson says they haven’t questioned him yet.”
“What’s the whole freaking thing?”
“You know or you wouldn’t be sitting here.”
“It looks like a pump and dump with an offshore angle.”
Milsberg jabbed the air with his chopsticks. “Bingo. Matson and me both got slammed by Granger and that lawyer in San Francisco, Burch. That son of a bitch. Matson lost almost a million and me one-point-two.”
A listless waitress wandered up to the table, order pad in hand.
“What’s good?” Gage asked Milsberg.
“Chow fun. Beef chow fun.”
“That’s fine,” Gage told her, and she shuffled off toward the kitchen.
Milsberg cleaned his glasses with a handkerchief. Pale skin surrounded reddened eyes and a comb-over that was graying and far less than adequate. He reminded Gage of those awkward kids in high school whose body parts seemed to grow at different rates.
“Who you working for?” Milsberg asked.
“Some of the shareholders.” Gage had planned the lie in advance. Better that Milsberg believed that Gage’s clients were fellow victims, rather than one of those he thought were the masterminds. “Most are devastated. Others are just pissed.”
“Not half as much as me. Once this all hits the papers, I won’t even get hired to count eggs at a chicken farm.” He didn’t laugh at his own attempted joke. “What’s your theory?”
Gage took a chance, saying a little more than he could yet prove. “Fake receivables paid for by selling stock.”
Milsberg nodded. “That’ll be the headline all right.”
“Why are you still hanging around?”
“We still have some orders to fill and somebody’s got to do the books. There’s enough money coming in to cover our reduced salaries. It’s not much, but I’ve got a kid in college, so a little is better than none.”
The waitress set a pot of tea, a cup, and a napkin in front of Gage.
“When did you figure it out?” Gage asked.
“One day too late. There was something weird since just before we went public. We’d get these big orders from Asia, but I never knew how. We never had a sales staff out there. I’d ask Matson. He’d tell me that it was through Granger’s connections. That’s why the board approved his fees. A couple of hundred grand in two years. I could understand the orders from Europe. Matson was traveling there all the time, working the market. That’s what he was always good at, sales. He could sell a pork sandwich to a vegan-twice.”
Milsberg poked around in his chow fun with his chopsticks.
“It was only after the collapse that Matson told me that Granger and Burch set up a bunch of burn companies…You know what burn companies are, right?”
Gage nodded.
“When Matson went back after the collapse, the customers were gone. Poof. Up in smoke.”
Milsberg set down his chopsticks.
“If it weren’t for our pastor, my wife would’ve divorced me. She’s kind of a religious nut. She used to teach
